


Caniche

by elvisqueso



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Original Characters - Freeform, Coffee Shops, Drabble Sequence, F/M, Fluff, Freeform, Kagome stays in the future, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-07-03 15:58:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15822201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elvisqueso/pseuds/elvisqueso
Summary: Coffee-shop AU, set post-ending, Kagome stays in the future, semi-canon, eventual smut. Slow burn told in 100 word snippets. There. All your bases. Covered.Updates are irregular.





	1. Benny.

**Author's Note:**

> Meant for this to only be on Dokuga, originally. Oh, well.
> 
> Props to you if you get the joke in the title.

He has no attachment to time.  Time can get away from him all it likes, now.  There’s no smile to measure it against, watch it burn down; a quick wick in a cheap candle.  Tuesday afternoons are never-ending but he knows it’s four in the afternoon because _she_ arrives and that it is five-thirty because she has left.  She has little orange locust leaves in her hair and she won’t notice them until she’s home and looking for them.  Because of this, it is Autumn.  He knows.  For him she measures the passage of time.  She’s always gone too soon.


	2. Sammy.

The last memory _she_ has of him replays itself.  She wakes and he is there: bulwark against the slithering fragments of demons, those breaking against him like they were no more substantial than paper planes.  Him waiting, quiet, for her to wake.  “We fly” and they’re flying up and through all of the ugliness and there is a bright green shock of light from his left side.  What happened in between then and now and what could have filled five hundred years?  But she couldn’t ask.

And was he surprised to see her at all?  He has a good poker-face.


	3. Artie.

She tells _them_ it is because he makes a killer macchiato with homemade whip cream in a dollop on the top.  She tells them: nobody else makes it that good and even if they do, she’d still go to _Café du Caniche_.  There’s a little library book exchange there with anything from _Genji_ to Gorky.  There are poetry readings and open mic nights.  Next door is a hookah bar, and so the aromatic vapors sometimes trail in on the warm days when the front windows are open.

_Eri_ told her it’s because she thinks the owner’s a hot piece of—


	4. Billie.

No, she didn’t.  She sometimes looks up at him over the rim of her cup and across the counter and she _doesn’t_ but he _is_ and he isn’t.  He is tall, superimposed images of black and silver swirling in her memory.  Green light from his left side – the side where there was red and then nothing.  The brilliant light now gone.

The time to ask is past because she didn’t _see_ until it was too late what he was and _is_ ; recognizing too late that familiarity she saw in his face.   And she, being too ashamed, will not try again.


	5. Louis.

Or, she _wouldn’t_ have tried again.  The status-quo is an unsustainable resource with a severely limited shelf-life. 

It happens because it is a slow day in the café, and the rain coming down in sheets — cold rain, not-quite-snow, and thunder — and she thought she’d wait it out a little bit before booking it for the bus stop.  But the rain comes down harder still, and soon the café empties except for her and _him_.

“I’m closing up in a few minutes,” he says, “if you wait, I can give you a ride to the bus stop after I lock up.”


	6. Mitzi.

Self-sabotage is a bullet in the gun of anxiety.  She fires:

“I’ll be okay.”

But he’s faster than bullets and she’d forgotten, and he says:

“Yes, because I’m giving you a ride to the bus stop.”

 

She watches him close up and lock up and realizes, belatedly, that he still takes as much care in his appearance as he did _then_ and don’t his eyes look bright framed with autumn gold and burgundy?  She says she ought to ask him for beauty tips, and then those eyes are on her now and he just tells her: yes, she ought to.


	7. Dizzy.

_There’s_ a thing to give one pause.  She’d forgotten that, too, a tongue could be sharper than claws and yet still be sweet.  The doors are locked and the lights turned off and she’s close to him under his umbrella stepping over puddles and he’s still as tall as she remembers.  He’s _vintage_ now, and so in-vogue.  It’s startling.

He drives an Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato, sleek and silver and indulgent as anything else she’d come to expect from him these days.  To top it off he drives _stick_ and that’s even more pretentious and just as suitable to him.


	8. Peggy.

On the way there, they don’t talk.  _She_ gets caught on the minutiae: the smooth shine of his claws casually wrapped around the gear shift, the dapple of street-lamps through the car window, the leather of the seat, the wind-blow of the climate control, the click of the blinkers when he stops where the bus will be.

But she’s hurtling through space in a private universe with _him_.

He _hmm_ s and switches on the radio.  It’s late at night, and the stations all liquid mixes and electro-xylophone melodies over blue beats.  “I could also just drive you home,” he says.


	9. Basie.

Halfway to stepping out into that dark wet and not, she _looks_ at him.  Not just at all of him but at his eyes – those steady, constant, glimmering points of aurum.  There’s a laugh worming its way up her throat and when it comes out those eyes blink and spark.

“You’re gonna keep asking until I give in anyway, huh?”

A smile.  “You’re learning.”

The belt snaps back in, and he turns the music up a few numbers.  She taps her address into his phone and they watch the world go past in streaks of blue and white and black.


	10. Nina.

She wants to ask him what he’s been doing.  She wants to ask about the books and the poetry.  About the café and where he learned to make coffee.  When did he learn to drive and what music does he like, if he likes it at all?  What does this world look like to him now, full of humans and electric light?  Where has he been?

What about Rin?

She _can’t_ ask.  Not here in the secret safe of his car.  She can’t ask the hundred million questions that buzz her mind feeling the static of _him_ sitting just there.


	11. Eartha.

Colors pulse past the window, a little light show for travelers.  He’s got less questions than _she_ does, but no less burning.  There she is: knees tapping together to the music, fingertips pink with neat little nails (he likes her nails) tapping along, too.  He can feel her when she shifts in her seat, and marks the tempo of her breaths against the music and the rain.

The GPS says “turn left” and he’s on her street now.  “Your destination is on the right.”  He has arrived so she can depart and he has that dropping anticipation of loss inside.


	12. Josie.

There’s a beat, a moment, a pause when _something_ might happen as she leaves him but it doesn’t.  A breath, a look, and a word of thanks and she’s gone out into the inky wet black, crossed the lawn to her condo’s door.  Between raindrops on the car window, she turns a key and a knob and looks back at him until the door is closed again.  The second-floor windows light up when he shifts into gear and is gone himself, and from himself, wondering what the something he was hoping would happen was, and if she was wondering, too.


	13. Dinah.

Today there is no rain, and she says it’s “Such a nice day, don’t you think?” —while the mug passes from his hands to hers.  Here is the second shift in a series of shifts; something fundamental changing in those four o’clock hours normally held on so few words beyond reciting her order, him confirming it, and a thank-you between them.

“For being indoors.”  He tells her.  It’s for last night’s rain still cooling the street, making the city-air mildew, and somewhere between his wanderings and the advent of indoor heating he’d come to enjoy watching the world through windows.


	14. Frankie.

She asks him how long he’s had the café.  “Not long,” he says, “but nothing seems long ago to me, now.”  The café is very new: only a few years old.  But he’d learned to make coffee a century ago in Ankara from a Jewish man who was just happy to know Sesshomaru wasn’t British.

“You were friends.”  She smiles at him, and he thinks her smile is familiar-feeling, although he’s not certain how.

“Hmm.  As much as I am generally able to be friends with anyone.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got old,” he tells her, “and he died.”


	15. Carmen.

She still can’t ask about the time she knew.  She asks, instead, of time between the ends of the Well.

He remembers the introduction of trains.  His first time on one not long before they’d become the veins feeding city-lifeblood across continents.  America, he remembers, boasted their speed in laying down four thousand miles of track in the wilderness.  He’d seen that wilderness and felt he was drowning in the vastness of it.  Not like Japan, he tells her— in Japan he always knew where the land ended.  Where it changed.  He didn’t care to stay in America, he says.


	16. Bessie.

He’d found himself in Mexico during a period of isolationism.  The American spirits, he tells her, they were born from the soil and the sky.  Rarely were they made from the emotions of men, and he wondered how that could be.  The dogs there were not warriors like himself: they were healers, barely moving in their sun-lounging.  “Dogs and Men will always be friends,” he’d been told by one of them.  He realized they were right.

“Perhaps,” he wonders aloud, softly and close, “we dogs have always searched for that.  But none of us would admit that’s what we did.”


	17. Sarah.

Things shift as time shifts, sometimes in overlapping moments or hours or years.  She watches his face as he tells stories, now staying with him after he’s closed his doors to the rest of the world.

He finds it strange to speak so much of the past when he had no reason to speak of it before.  There was the past they knew together, that year or so of a time that sat framed in his memory.  Keenly remembered, and unmoving.  His memory of _her_ was the damsel in distress that could fight with light too pure to look at.


	18. Oscar.

“So, what’s the deal?” And Eri and the others are leaning so far over the table she thinks it might break under the weight of all of them.

“What’s the deal with what?”  She asks.

“What’s the deal with you and _him_?”  and they all seem so aghast to think she might not have known who they were talking about.  “You know, that hot barista you’ve been talking to.”

All their voices overlap and cut into each other, a shrill chorus of “when will’s” and “did you’s” and “did _he_ ’s.”  She wonders how much she really ought to tell them.


	19. Shirley.

Could she explain, really, who he was before or who he really was to her now?  He told her stories, and she told him stories too— less-interesting ones about small things she’d during the intermittent years, and he listened to each word with complete stillness.

She catches herself dreaming him up in the quiet moments of her day.  The way his fingers glide so gently over countertops and the heat of his arm brushing lightly against hers.  She envisions the smooth dip and curve of his jaw, his neck.  The graceful tension of each turn and tilt of his head.


	20. Lena.

It shouldn’t be so strange, she thinks, to see him by chance outside of their routine.  Perhaps some small part of her couldn’t imagine him existing beyond _Café du Caniche,_ where that romantic shape of his memory is held so carefully in stories.  And yet, there he is: casually leaning against the rails of an outdoor ice rink, the blades on his shoes making him even taller than usual.

Steeling herself, she sidles up to him and bumps his arm with her elbow.  “Hey, there,” she says, and his face opens, brightening, and seeming just as bewildered to see _hers_.


	21. Dee Dee.

His hand finds her shoulder and gently squeezes, as if he also needs to make certain that, yes, she is _here_ , existing in the World and not just in the café.  “Hello.”  He smiles, and it’s like the sun cutting through the grey afternoon overcast. 

“Taking a day off?”

“Hm.”

He points to a boy of about seven pulling himself along the rink railing, a look of fierce determination on his face.  “My grandson.  Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Not blood.  I raised his father.”

He’s never told her _this_ story and now she’s got a mouthful of questions to ask.


End file.
